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Friday, November 30, 2012

THE ABCs OF RACISM IN AMERICA

HOW TO GO FROM BEING ONE OF THEM TO BEING ONE OF YOU

Temecula, CA – From just reading about the ‘drama’ between
Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Nicki Minaj, plus watching the HBO DVD Joe Louis, America’sHero…Betrayed,
with the election still ringing across the land stirring talk of state (30)
secession blowing in the wind like Old Glory, I figured it was time for an
equal opportunity husband to put in his two cents. The space my mind and
mindset operate in now is my core unique personality and the culture I share is
that of an American, a Californian, and the likes/dislikes of PT Rothschild
solely. My class is middle but as the son of a teacher and a spy, I’ve always
had that sprinkle of adventure and wanderlust.

Though the Memoirs of
Mr. Pete & Mary Jane Green origin story concerning The Autobiography of My Alter Ego is of a real-life ‘Billy Batson’,
the alter ego of the comic super hero that outsold Superman, the real starting point for the bend in my life’s road
started from a quest that my grandfather gave me. He said, “Pete, when I see
you on the other side, answer one question for me.”

“Sure,” Granddaddy, “what is it?”

“Find out for me what
it is the white man wants from us (Negroes). They don’t want us around but they
wouldn’t let us leave the country (Marquis Garvey). The ones of us they like,
they hold up higher than their own people. They like our women (miscegenation)
but we can’t even look at theirs, all the while black mothers have nursed white
children for a century or more. What do they want of us?”

The next time that I see my grandfather I will have much to
say in answer to his original question, but the topic of ‘why’ and ‘racism’ can
be tied up to a few factors. The first is cultural identity from history. For
the biblical beginnings to racism I did the story, Is God A Redneck? The premise is from Gen 11:9 and indeed, the
human narrator says almost as much in Gen 11:4. The reasoning for God’s
bequeathing this wrinkle on the young human race is given in Gen 11:6, a
foresight that seems to be coming truer by the day given the nature of America
and the new ‘global force’ for peace, drones.

Before the modern concept of racism, you had place-ism,
where everyone knew their place including women and children ‘who should be
seen and not heard’. I remember hearing the ‘children’ one in the early part of
my childhood sprouted by ‘older people’ of the day, aka grandparents. Rock ‘n’
roll kicked that old ditty to the curb, and I remember when that happened too.

America, for good or ill, has brought all the people who had
a place/country to a central ‘melting pot’ location but people don’t melt
together, they form little pockets of culture nests so they feel at home. In
fact, America marketed itself as that. But before slavery came to our
shoreline, America was starting out in that direction. Then the good Christians
who didn’t want any outside blood being mixed in [like they were Jews] went to
ministers with Gen 1:11, 12, 21, 24, and 25. Backed by the Bible, separation of
whites from non-whites started and became a tradition.

However, from the start Cupid’s arrows were colorblind and
this led to turmoil at worse and ostracizing at best [see Kit Carson, western
hero and why he had to live on the outskirts of town]. Separation spawned new
Christian sects [see origins of the A.M.E. Christian Church]. For a long time
white women who were caught fucking a black man were automatically ‘legally
raped’ bringing a lynching to the black lover. Black women who got pregnant by
white men either had the child and passed them off, or got an illegal abortion
in some back alley, unless they knew someone who was legit but underground. In
the middle of all this early separation was the Indian [Native American]
Question.

Indians, no matter the tribe, knew the value of having fresh
blood for the tribe. As ‘savages’ they suffered from no racial/quasi-religious
segregation anxiety, killing the men during an attack and sparing the
women/children. Modern warfare from Christians and Muslims holds no such
honor. All civilians are combatants. Perhaps because of this ethnic
feature or perhaps some other more esoteric factor, racism is colorblind, as it
is found in almost all groupings, but is not pervasive through all groups. Mix
in the actual skin color variations exhibiting distinct ethnic skill sets and
physical characteristics, customs, with historical baggage/attitudes; and you
have a reality show to entertain a universe because a portion of the various
groupings are real people no longer trapped inside their cultural tradition of
expected racism, aka peer pressure.

By and large, the people that I have met along my life
travels who were the most real and least prejudiced by nature were the ones
labeled as ‘black sheep’ by other family members. If ‘black sheep’ are least
affected by racism or culture clash, what is it that releases your inner
culture identity and turns you from one of them to one of you? This being an
empire founded upon Christian/Bible knowledge, there are 3 ways to become a
real person in America and escape racism. If you fail to qualify for the ways
listed but would still like to be a better person, follow the asterisk(*) to the
‘trap door’ way.

The first way past racism is the arts. The heading can
further be subdivided into fame, since successful artists often get famous,
with prime examples Oprah, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and to a lesser degree, almost
any artist that is recognized for their art beyond the color barrier. For me it
happened when the first writing gig I ever had ended. The editor/publisher had
hired me for my ‘West End’ input**. I took the gig as a black person trying my
hand at writing, ‘a lark’. When the mag folded a year later, I left with the
mindset of being a writer, not a ‘black’ writer because I had been assigned a
wide range of topics. People of both cultures, black and white since it was in
the 80s south, commented positively on pieces that crossed the cultural
boundaries.

The second way is heritage and researching your family tree.
Everybody is ‘kin’ to everybody, and in the south peculiarly so. My mother’s
father was fine featured, smooth complexioned, dark skinned, perhaps British
West Indian, or Jamaican/Haitian in heritage, though in manner, I’d lean toward
the former not the latter. My mother’s mother was Jewish by bloodline having a traveling
French Jewish salesman for a father and an octoroon mother whose father had
also been a traveling Jewish person, possibly a merchant. In pictures, she
looked like an unsmiling Creole girl.

My father’s father was a mystery except that he was from
Arabia and had been sold into slavery. The ship bringing him to America
mutinied and the slaves, now free, settled in Saint Croix. There they lived approximately
ten years until 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation migrating
to America which was just starting to boom after the war. Settling in Georgia,
my father’s father came over to America a free man and married a Georgia
Cherokee Native American woman. She seemed a stout woman from the pictures that
I remember and my father reached a height of 6’1”. Both she and my father
shared a dark reddish brown smooth skin over strong manly facial features.

Growing up in a household with a dark-skinned grandfather, a
German-Jewish looking grandmother [they had to carry their marriage license
when they were younger so they sheriff would know they weren’t a ‘mixed’
couple], a mother who was medium tan, an aunt who was light tan, my immediate extended
family went from mulatto (barely tan, slightly full features), to a couple of
very dark, sharp featured Haitian-like relatives was a colored Happy Days (pun
intended). Since no one in my family or in my family’s circle of friends ‘looked
or talked like Amos ‘n’ Andy’ and I grew up listening to the cowboy movie/TV
tagline, “The only good Injun is a dead Injun” my cap gun cultural identity was
racially ambiguous.

This mental ambiguity was not helped by a dominant stay-at-home
grandmother who had an outside rep/street cred for taking no shit, and despite
going to segregated white only hair salons [by passing for white], she still
chased white salesmen off the front porch and got that ‘I’ll get my broom’ look
in her eye when I once joked about asking a ‘white girl’ to the prom. Knowing
that I had Jewish blood came when I angrily called Granny ‘an old Jewish wash
woman’ once as a very young child, a comment that prompted a hushed family
meeting that night when my mother and her sister, my aunt, got home from
teaching school. Finding out that I am considered Jewish came just a few years
ago when a Jewish neighbor explained how the ‘Jewish’ bloodline is passed down
through the female/mother’s side, and not the father’s side.

The third way past racism/cultural ethnic identity is the
metaphysics way. Religious dogma is the least metaphysical and Divine
Intervention is the most, with ‘magical’ people falling in the middle. Tricky
Dick was a Quaker and Quakers are not racist to people in need. Nixon saw improving
race relations not as a waste of time, but as a waste of HIS time since no numbers that mattered were ever going to vote for
him. The racist spin was put into the subject matter by the 20-year Ag
Secretary, Earl Butz, who infamously said that ‘all black men care about is
tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.’ (Des Moines Register)

Two weeks later Earl Butz was history from karma but
sometimes divine intervention takes a more direct approach. There was a Klansman’s
wife on Oprah once, maybe a couple of times. She was full of bigotry and
believed all the false claims of racial/bloodline superiority. She and Oprah
had a much more intense stare down than the first Obama/Romney debate and
fought to a standstill on logic. This woman was no ignorant redneck; she was an
intellectual redneck.

After her second visit, flying back to her home state, she ‘was
struck by the truth’ and her heart changed. She could put the change under no
other heading than ‘from God’. She flew back and reappeared on Oprah’s show a
week or maybe a month later. I had seen the second show and clips of the first.
To see this woman who looked so defiant and yes, valiant since she wholly
believed her point of view, now humbled but not broken, her former life in
tatters and shifting to the positive members of the families brought tears to
our eyes when I watched daytime TV with my former wife, a Wiccan. Which brings
me to the last avenue past your cultural identity, ‘magical’ people, be they
witches, pagans, gypsies, and other ‘strange people’ of that ilk.

Long before I met the witch, my cultural skin had been shed
like a snake’s, by my association and acceptance into a circle of ‘magical’ social
acquaintances, all artistic, hipster-ish, and witchy. When I left that
association, coupled with my new found status as a writer, I realized a change had
occurred as I now existed outside my old group cultural identity, aware of it
but not trapped inside it anymore. Some people who know my marriage history may
think my mindset comes from ‘switching it up’ in wives or from having ‘white
friends.’ It doesn’t.

So what if you don’t have the fame, art, magic, or ever find
out your heritage, what is a person to do who comes from dissimilar circumstances?
The trap door*?